A while back I wanted to read The Lord of the Rings aloud with my wife. We’ve read lots of books together this way, and I’m a huge LOTR fan, so I really wanted to share it. The problem is it’s very long and many people consider lots of it boring. So, I took a clever (if I do say so myself) shortcut! I went through the books and dog-eared ranges of pages where the plot differed from the movies in a way I thought significant or noteworthy. For example, I read the entire chapter “The scouring of the shire” because this was left out of the movie. I highlighted the differences in Denethor’s character as much as I could, as well as Faramir’s. Both were substantially diminished in moral quality in the movies.
I want to go back through what I did, and post it here with annotations, so that others can read the same portions of the books in tandem with the movies to get a much more accurate picture of what the books are all about. The problem is that before I had this great idea, I had already read half of Fellowship, so I’ll have to make some decisions about what parts of that to keep.